Recently in E-books Category
The Read for Fun (US) book club will meet this Friday (October 21) during lunch in the Loeb Room. The book is I Am Number Four, and those who have already read that can read the sequel, The Power of Six. Both books are on our e-readers and in print too.
The Lower School Guys Read club is reading Son of Neptune which was released on October 4. We'll meet next Wednesday (October 26) in the Loeb Room during Lower School lunch. This is the second book in Rick Riordan's second series of action adventures based on Greek and Roman mythology, and we have it on our e-readers and in hard copy.
We saw a lot of action today: both book clubs met, we looked at our new e-readers, had a channel 13 TV crew film the US group using the e-readers, looked at the Volunteer State Book Awards ballot, talked about our books, and picked new books for next month. Whew.
The US club talked about Incarceron, which had some similarities to The Maze Runner and Hunger Games, but took on its own mythology and philosophy. The sequel, Sapphique, also sounds good based on the review of a couple of members. For next month, we chose Dark Life by Kat Falls, a book about an undersea bastion of civilization where some sinister events are occurring. Unfortunately, I can't find an e-book version (Scholastic needs to get on board!), so I'll get extra copies and have a couple at the front desk so they can be checked out over spring break.
The LS group went over Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment and got a preview of the other books in the series from one guy who has read them all several times. We chose Incarceron, which some of the group had already started reading, for April. The Maximum Ride series and Incarceron are on the Sony e-readers but not available yet on the Nook, and we have the regular books also.
Hope everyone has a great spring break, and happy reading!
I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages. My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out! We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.
When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories? Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or would they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them? How would they be aware that the books exist? I know they say that a person’s educational success can be predicted by the number of books in their parents’ house,* so what would happen to the kids’ intellects if there were no physical books to look at? That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.
Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not. Books need to be out in front of kids, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them. Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.
*“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports [a] study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."
